RE: CD-R & DVD-R for the iSeries and Office Vision, 2 seperate questions -- MIDRANGE-L

Brad,

Sounds like you got a real WINNER here...!  Seems like a MUST have, for many
shops, for a very broad number of reasons (which can be summed up as:  MUCH
more EFFECTIVE backups).  Let me know if you're giving away units to beta
sites...!

Is your gear covered by IBM maintenance?  May be a hassle and/or expensive
to get, but that always increased my comfort level with 3rd party products.


Time to market is key, because as soon as you get even a whiff of success,
IBM'll come out with a product, and there goes your margins...  (Most shops,
in my experience, will prefer to pay "x" dollars more to get an IBM
product.)


I don't understand the last question because I don't know what OPTINST is.
If that's IBM code, IMHO, you would NOT want to modify it.

Finally, back to the subject of multi-volume processing, if you're a member
of PWD (I've lapsed), you can get more info on LIPI's here, under first
heading, "General Resources":
http://www.as400.ibm.com/developer/resource.html.


jt

| -----Original Message-----
| From: midrange-l-admin@midrange.com
| [mailto:midrange-l-admin@midrange.com]On Behalf Of Brad Jensen
| Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2001 1:22 AM
| To: midrange-l@midrange.com
| Subject: Re: CD-R & DVD-R for the iSeries and Office Vision, 2 seperate
| questions
|
|
|
|
| > Hello everyone,
| >
| > I've have a couple of queries to follow up on and thought I
| might get better
| > feed back from this group than I have been recieving from IB....
| >
| > Does anyone know if there are plans to introduce a directly
| attached CD
| > writer and/or DVD writer for the as/400, if so will there be
| OS/400 or
| > hardware minimum requirements, i.e. V5R1 on the new 2/8xx series
| ?
|
| We have a direct attach CD writer for the AS/400, we have had it
| for five years, and It creates CDs you can load on your AS/400.
|
| We could do a DVD writer too, I suppose. The problem with DVDs are
| they are a very slow writer - 1.3 MB a second.  The second problem
| is that the DVD writers I have seen have all ben cartidge DVDs,
| and you can't read one in a DVD reader (except a cartidge reader).
| And even then there are different 'standards'.
|
| Pardon my cluelessness, but is IBM shipiing DVD readers on new
| AS/400s?
|
| And has anyone see a DVD writer that writes to 'naked' DVDs that
| can be read in a DVD-ROM reader?
|
| Basically we can write AS/400 tape data to any peripheral that can
| attach to a PC, and with a little more work (that we plan to do)
| we could go the other way also. In other words, SAVLIB to our
| device, we take your SAVLIB, maybe zip it, and write it to
| DVD-RAM, CD-R, anything else you want.
|
| Then we read from the device and present it back to the SCSI
| interface as a tape file.
|
| One simple thing you might do is SAVLIB to a version of our
| device, then write your normal AS/400 tapes on a tape drive
| attached to our device. Why would you want to do this?
|
| Faster backups. Write to our device, you would be writing to RAM
| most of the time (put a couple of gigabytes of ram on the thing),
| and hard drives do burst mode up to 100MB a second. No tape
| positioning time.
|
| Duplicate backups. You backup to our hard drive, we write
| 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 copies of your tape. How many save while active
| backup users are writing a second copy of their tape(s) like they
| should?
|
| Permanent backups. Compress your databases with zip type
| compression, and you may gain compression up to 10X or more (the
| best we have seen was 16 times - 94% - but I think it was a backup
| of db saves of spool files.) Our worst compressing so far was 60%,
| which is 2.5 times - or 1`.6 GB on a 25 cent CD. Make two or three
| permanent copies. It hink this will end up being a popular way to
| save data, because it is small, fast, copies are fast and cheap. I
| just bought a 24X CD writer for $139. It wasn't on sale.
|
| Restore is lightning fast. No wait for tape search.
|
| It would be trivial for IBM to support mutlivolume tape format
| files on a CD, with header and trailer (EOV for continued volumes)
| on their existing CD reader. And since they have zip-decompression
| software on the AS/400, and decompression is relatively
| lightweight load on the CPU, they could do that also. All of
| sudden that CD-R would be a very useful peripheral.
|
| They way I see it working is this: You savlib/savobj to my device
| as one humongous tapefile. I split it,  put into CD-sized chunks
| with EOV labels (I would make them up based on the EOF labels on
| the tape image) and write a series of CDs, including zipping the
| data file if IBM decides to support that.
|
| Or just use the compression and restore them from the disk copy if
| you use them in the next few days, or back thru the CD drive(s) on
| the PC, filtered through my software. Or write a compressed CD
| with the option to copy/convert it to AS/400 native format.
|
| I could put a robot CD writer in my backup server, if it was
| considered necessary. Write 10 CDs a night = 6.5 GB uncompressed,
| and somewhere between 16 GB and 100 GB  depending on the
| compression. It costs $2.50 cents, and you can make a second copy
| in an hour. You would save far more than that in operator time.
| Would a $20 million dollar company pay $5 a night to gain two
| permanent digital copies of its essential business records? What
| about a $200 million dollar company?
|
| >From what I am reading in the specs, plus the guidance of one of
| the IBM authors of the white paper, if you guys are willing to use
| LODRUN to restore, I can save libraries of any length to CD. I
| sincerely did not consider that as an option until I heard the
| response here.
|
| Thanks!
|
| I wonder if I could modify the OPTINST to unzip files as it
| restore them?
|
|
| Brad Jensen
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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